Dorsch T. - Classical Literary Criticism

Translated by PENELOPE MURRAY
and T. S. DORSCH, with an Introduction
and Notes by PENELOPE MURRAY

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First edition published 1965
This edition published 2000
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Original translations by T. S. Dorsch, 1965
Introduction, revised translations, new
material and notes by Penelope Murray, 2000
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EISBN 9780141913407

Literary criticism is a label that covers a number of different activities. In the narrow sense in which it is customarily used today, it refers to the analysis and interpretation of texts; but in its wider application literary criticism is concerned with more fundamental questions about the nature and function of literature: what is literature? How is it created? What are its effects? How do we evaluate it? Literary criticism can include scholarly exegesis, evaluative judgement, prescriptive criticism, literary history, and theory, and thus might be broadly defined as discourse about literature. But literature itself is not a stable or self-evident category, so that discourse will inevitably vary with the changing nature of the literature that is its object. As T. S. Eliot observed, Our criticism from age to age will reflect the things that the age demands.

In the Western tradition, attitudes to literature have been profoundly shaped by the great writers and thinkers of classical antiquity. For it was they who invented much of the critical vocabulary and terminology which we still use today, and, as with so many areas of our culture, it was they who first formulated some of the most basic and enduring questions. Literary critics throughout the ages have returned again and again to classical themes, and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the history of criticism cannot properly be understood without some knowledge of the key ancient texts from which later approaches to literature were developed. Principal amongst these are the works of the four authors presented in this volume Plato, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus all of whom have exerted a seminal influence on the discourse of criticism in the Western world.

Before turning to the texts themselves, however, some account needs That striking image reminds us that the Poetics is not only the starting point, but also the culmination, of a tradition. Many of its ideas have their roots in the literature of earlier periods, and behind it lies a whole inheritance of speculation about the nature of poetry which goes right back to the first-known Western poet, Homer. Indeed, the origins of criticism in Greece are deeply bound up with poetry, for it is in response to poetry that many of the fundamental doctrines of ancient literary criticism are formulated, and it is inpoetry that the impulse to criticism first manifests itself. Theoretical discourse about literature and the critical analysis of it, what we might call criticism proper, is, of course, a subsequent development, but in order to understand that development we need to consider the ways in which poetry was envisaged by poets themselves in the pre-theoretical period. For criticism has its beginnings in the reflections of the early Greek poets on the nature of their art.